Jean Ross
Jean Iris Ross Cockburn was a British writer, political activist, and film critic. She was a life-long member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. During the Spanish Civil War, she was a war correspondent for the Daily Express and is alleged to have been a press agent for the Comintern. A skilled writer, Ross was also a film critic for The Daily Worker, and her criticisms of early Soviet cinema were later described as "ingenious piece of dialectical sophistry." Throughout her life, she wrote political criticism and anti-fascist polemics, as well as manifestos for a number of disparate organizations such as the British Workers' Film and Photo League.
During her itinerant youth in Weimar Berlin, Ross was a cabaret singer and fashion model. Her Berlin escapades served as the basis for the fictional character Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories, a work cited by literary critics as deftly capturing the hedonistic nihilism of the Weimar era. The work was later adapted into the stage musical Cabaret. For the remainder of her life, Ross believed the public association of herself with the naïve and apolitical character of Bowles occluded her lifelong work as a professional writer and political activist. Sharing this belief, her daughter Sarah Caudwell later wrote a newspaper article in an attempt to correct the historical record and to dispel misconceptions regarding Ross. According to Caudwell, "in the transformations of the novel for stage and cinema the characterization of Sally has become progressively cruder and less subtle and the stories about 'the original' correspondingly more high-colored."
In addition to inspiring the character of Sally Bowles, Ross is credited by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and other sources as the muse for lyricist Eric Maschwitz's jazz standard "These Foolish Things," one of the twentieth century's most enduring love songs. Although Maschwitz's estranged wife Hermione Gingold later claimed the popular song was written for herself or actress Anna May Wong, Maschwitz himself contradicted these claims. Instead, Maschwitz cited "fleeting memories of young love," and most scholars posit Maschwitz's youthful affair with Ross as inspiring the song.
Early life and education
Raised "in luxury" at Maison Ballassiano in the British protectorate of Alexandria, Egypt, Ross was the eldest daughter of Charles Ross, a Scottish cotton classifier for the Bank of Egypt. She was brought up with her four siblings in a staunchly liberal, anti-Tory household.Ross was educated in England at Leatherhead Court, Surrey. As an unusually intelligent pupil who had completed all the sixth form curricula by the age of sixteen, she was profoundly bored and loathed school. She became openly rebellious when informed that she must remain at school for another year and must "occupy her time doing all the same work all over again." To gain her freedom, she feigned a teenage pregnancy and was summoned before the school's stern headmistress:
Ross falsely insisted to the headmistress that she was pregnant, and the Leatherhead Court schoolmasters sequestered the teenage Ross in a nearby sanatorium until a family relative arrived and retrieved her. However, when they discovered the pregnancy was feigned, Ross was formally expelled. Exasperated by her defiant behaviour, her parents sent her abroad to Pensionnat Mistral, an elite Swiss finishing school in Neuchâtel; however, Ross was either expelled or fled the school.
Using a trust stipend provided by her grandfather Charles Caudwell who was "a wealthy landowner and industrialist," the teenage Ross returned to England and enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. After diligently applying herself in her first year, she garnered a coveted acting prize "which entitled her to take the lead role in a play of her choice." When Ross selected the difficult role of Phaedra, however, she was informed that her youth precluded such a tragic role as she lacked the requisite life experience. Hurt by this refusal, the teenage Ross left the academy after one year to pursue a film career.
In 1930, at nineteen years of age, Ross and fellow Egyptian-born actress Marika Rökk obtained her cinematic roles portraying a harem houri in director Monty Banks' Why Sailors Leave Home, an early sound comedy filmed in London. Ross' dark complexion and partial fluency in Arabic were deemed suitable for the role. Disappointed by their small roles, Ross and Rökk heard hopeful rumours that there were ample job opportunities for aspiring thespians in the Weimar Republic of Germany, and the adventurous duo set-off with great expectations for Central Europe.
Weimar Berlin
Ross' excursion to Central Europe proved less successful than she had hoped. Ross was unable to find acting opportunities and, by early 1931, she instead worked as a nightclub singer in Weimar Germany, presumably in lesbian bars. When not singing or modelling, Ross often haunted the offices of the UFA GmbH, the German motion picture production company, in the hopes of landing small film roles as an actress. By Autumn 1931, she obtained a theatrical job as a dancer in theatre director Max Reinhardt's Tales of Hoffmann, the latter Offenbach's opéra fantastique. She also performed in Reinhardt's production of Peer Gynt as Anitra.Reinhardt's much-anticipated production of Tales of Hoffmann premiered on November 28, 1931. In the production, reputedly one of the last great triumphs of the Berlin theatre scene prior to the Nazi Party's gradual ascent, Ross and a male dancer appeared together as an amorous couple in the stage background and were visible only in silhouette during the Venetian palace sequence of the second act. Later, Ross boasted that she and the male performer had capitalized on this opportunity for sexual intimacy in full view of the unsuspecting audience.
Meeting Isherwood
By Winter 1931, Ross had relocated to Schöneberg, Berlin, where she shared modest lodgings in Fräulein Meta Thurau's flat at Nollendorfstraße 17 with English novelist Christopher Isherwood, whom she had met in October 1930 or in early 1931. An aspiring novelist, Isherwood was politically ambivalent about the rise of fascism and had specifically relocated to Berlin for the gay nightlife. At their very first meeting, Ross "dominated the conversation, describing men with whom she had slept" and, at one point, she "delved into her handbag and brought out a diaphragm" which she waved in the face of a startled Isherwood. The two soon became intimate friends.Although Ross' relations with Isherwood were not always amicable, she soon joined Isherwood's social circle alongside more politically-aware poets W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Subsequently, "as the sole woman in a group of gay male friends, Ross came to be by this group in its various memoirs." Among Isherwood's acquaintances, Ross was regarded as sexual libertine devoid of inhibitions who had no qualms about entertaining visitors to their flat while bathing, or about discussing her sexual relations. A contemporary portrait of Ross at twenty years of age appears in Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin when the narrator first encounters the "divinely decadent" Sally Bowles:
in Weimar Berlin in 1932. By the time Ross and Isherwood departed that same year, such parades were a regular occurrence.
Isherwood further described the youthful Ross as physically resembling Merle Oberon but that her face naturally possessed a sardonic humor akin to comédienne Beatrice Lillie. Their ramshackle flat at Nollendorfstraße 17 was in "a working-class district" near the epicenter of Weimar Berlin's radical enclaves, subversive activity, and gay nightlife. By day, Ross was a fashion model for popular magazines. By night, she was a bohemian chanteuse singing in the nearby cabarets located along the Kurfürstendamm avenue, an "entertainment-vice district" which was singled out for future destruction by Joseph Goebbels in his 1928 journal. These cabarets would be shuttered by the Brownshirts when the Nazi Party seized power in early 1933. Isherwood visited these nightclubs to hear Ross' sing. He later described her voice as poor but nonetheless startlingly effective:
Due to her acquaintanceship with Isherwood, Ross would later become immortalized as "a bittersweet English " named Sally Bowles in Isherwood's 1937 novella and his 1939 book Goodbye to Berlin. While in Isherwood's company, she was introduced to American writer Paul Bowles when he visited Berlin. Bowles was a gay American writer who would later garner acclaim for his post-colonial novel The Sheltering Sky. This meeting between Ross and Paul Bowles ostensibly made a considerable impression upon Isherwood as he later used Paul Bowles' surname as the pseudonym for the character of Sally Bowles based upon Ross. Isherwood claimed that Ross was "more essentially British than Sally ; she grumbled like a true Englishwoman, with her 'grin-and-bear-it' grin. And she was tougher."
Abortion incident
Although Isherwood sometimes did have sex with women, Ross—unlike the fictional character of Sally—never tried to seduce Isherwood, although they were forced to share a bed together when their flat became overcrowded with visiting revelers. Instead Isherwood settled into a same-sex relationship with a working-class German young man named Heinz Neddermeyer, while Ross entered into a variety of heterosexual liaisons including one with a tall blond musician Götz von Eick, later known as actor Peter van Eyck and future star of Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear. Although identified by some biographers as Jewish, van Eyck was purportedly the wealthy scion of "land-owning aristocratic family in the Prussian region of Pomerania." As a privileged Pomeranian aristocrat, he had "originally expected to a pursue a military career," however, he became interested in jazz as a young man and pursued musical studies in Berlin.When the nineteen-year-old van Eyck met Ross, he often moonlighted as a jazz pianist in Berlin cabarets. Either during their brief relationship or soon after their separation, Ross realized she was pregnant. As a personal favour to Ross, Isherwood falsely claimed in medical documents to be her heterosexual impregnator in order for Ross to obtain an abortion procedure. Ross nearly died as a result of the abortion procedure after the doctor forgot a swab inside her. These events inspired Isherwood to write his story Sally Bowles and serves as its narrative climax.
Rise of the Nazis and Departure
By 1932, the Weimar Berlin that Ross, Isherwood, and other British expatriates witnessed was "in the grip of the Depression, with masses of people unemployed." Berlin's daily scenes featured "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right."As the political situation rapidly deteriorated in Berlin, Ross, Isherwood, Spender, and others realized that they must leave Germany. "There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled. In the July 1932 elections, the Nazis achieved a majority in the Reichstag and, by August that same year, Ross had departed Germany for good and returned to southern England. Within a year, Adolf Hitler's ascendance as German Chancellor and the increasing prevalence of xenophobic Nazism in the country would preclude both Ross and Isherwood from returning to their beloved Berlin. Many of the Berlin cabaret denizens befriended by Ross and Isherwood would later flee abroad or die in labour camps.
Activities in London
Joining the Communist Party
Now in southern England, Ross resided at Cheyne Walk in Chelsea, London, and continued to fraternize with Isherwood and his circle of artistic friends, however, she began to increasingly associate with left-wing political activists "who were humorous but dedicated, sexually permissive but politically dogmatic." During this time period, she was introduced to Claud Cockburn, an Anglo-Scots journalist and the second cousin, once removed, of novelists Alec Waugh and Evelyn Waugh.They met at the Café Royal. Purportedly, Cockburn handed Ross a cheque one evening but—perhaps having second thoughts—he telephoned the next morning to warn her that the cheque would bounce. Despite this "portent of unreliability" and "the fact that Cockburn had already been married to an American woman whom he left when she became pregnant," Ross began an affair with Cockburn. In a subsequent evening, Cockburn expounded upon Marxist economic theory to Ross all night until the early morning hours. Cockburn later claimed that he convinced Ross to become a left-wing journalist and secured her employment at The Daily Worker.
Due to Cockburn's influence, Ross formally joined the Communist Party of Great Britain during the tenure of General Secretary Harry Pollitt. She would be an active and devoted Party member for the remainder of her life. Meanwhile, she continued her career as an aspiring thespian. She appeared in theatrical productions at the Gate Theatre Studio directed by Peter Godfrey and, in need of money, she modelled the latest Paris fashions by French designer Jean Patou in Tatler magazine. It is also possible, although unlikely, that she obtained a bit role as a chorus girl in Paramount Studios' musical drama film Rumba.
Isherwood and Viertel
While in England, Ross' connections to the British film industry proved crucial to Isherwood's future career. Ross had only spent eighteen months or so in Berlin between 1932 and 1933, but "during this time she became fluent enough in German so that, upon her return to England, she was able to work as a bilingual scenarist in the British film industry with Austro-German directors who had fled the Third Reich." One of these Austrian directors was Berthold Viertel who became Ross' friend.At the time, translators were sorely needed in the film industry to facilitate productions headed by such Austro-German directors who were now subsisting in the United Kingdom. Aware that Isherwood was living in reduced circumstances at the time, Ross induced her friend Viertel to hire Isherwood as a translator. As repayment for this favour, Ross asked Isherwood to promise to give half of his first week's salary from the job to her. However, after obtaining the job, Isherwood either reneged upon or forgot this agreement with Ross, and this incident may have contributed to the later souring of their friendship. Viertel and Isherwood soon collaborated upon a film which would become Little Friend, and this collaboration subsequently launched Isherwood's long, successful career as a screenwriter in Hollywood.
During this period in 1933, Isherwood composed the nucleus of a short story about Ross' abortion in Berlin that would later become his 1937 novella Sally Bowles. Dissatisfied with its structure and quality, Isherwood rewrote the manuscript during the subsequent years. He eventually sent the manuscript to editor John Lehmann to be published in New Writing, a new literary periodical. However—when Isherwood informed Lehmann that his story was based on factual events—the editor became worried about the story's climax since it drew upon Ross' abortion. Lehmann believed that Ross would file a successful libel suit against both Isherwood and himself if the story were published.
Anxious to avoid a libel suit, Isherwood implored Ross to give him permission to publish the story. Ross' reluctance delayed the publication of the manuscript. As abortion was a controversial topic in 1930s England and still carried the penalty of life imprisonment, Ross feared Isherwood's thinly-disguised story recounting her lifestyle and abortion in Berlin would further strain her tempestuous relationship with her status-conscious family. In order to prevail upon Ross to give consent for the novella's publication, Isherwood claimed he was in the most dire financial circumstances. As Ross herself was often impoverished, she sympathized with any friend in similar impecunious straits. Accordingly, as a personal favour to Isherwood, she yielded her objections to the publication of Sally Bowles. The novella was then published by Hogarth Press. Following the tremendous success of the Sally Bowles novella, Ross regretted this decision and believed it had permanently harmed her reputation. Now deeply committed to the socialist cause, Ross noticed that Isherwood's story undermined her standing "among those comrades who realized she was the model for Sally Bowles."
Workers' League and Embezzlement
Circa 1934–1935, while in England, Ross wrote the fiery manifesto for the short-lived British Workers' Film and Photo League and also served as its General Secretary. Much like its communist-backed U.S. counterpart, the British Workers Film and Photo League's main objective was to launch a cultural counter-offensive to the "bourgeois" and "nauseating" films produced by capitalist societies such as the United States and the United Kingdom. The organization sought to bring anti-capitalist "revolutionary films to workers organizations throughout the country." Despite its limited personnel and modest funds, the League produced newsreels, taught seminars on working-class film criticism, organized protests against "reactionary pictures," and screened the latest blockbusters of Soviet Russia to cadres of like-minded cineastes. They frequently screened such motion pictures as Storm over Asia, , Road to Life, and China Express.During Ross' tenure as General Secretary, the League was closely tied to the Friends of the Soviet Union and often sublet its office space to the latter collective. Upon her resignation as the League's Secretary, Ross continued to serve as a League member and helped produce the short film Defence of Britain in March 1936. Drawing upon her family's resources, Ross also personally donated a considerable sum to the fledgling organization in February 1936. However, another League member named Ivan Seruya embezzled the majority of Ross' donation in order to finance his own private venture International Sound Films. This incident and the subsequent dearth of organizational funds reportedly contributed to the League's lack of progress as well as its eventual demise in 1938.
Film Criticism for ''The Daily Worker''
Circa 1935–6, Ross was the film critic for The Daily Worker. She wrote her reviews using the alias Peter Porcupine, which she presumably adopted as a homage to radical English pamphleteer William Cobbett who had famously used the same pseudonym. Ross interest in film criticism had purportedly begun earlier in Berlin when she often attended the cinema together with Isherwood, Auden, and Spender. According to Spender, their quartet of friends collectively viewed upon release such notable films as Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, and Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. They were particularly fond of "heroic proletarian films" such as G. W. Pabst's Comradeship, as well as "Russian films in which photography created poetic images of labor and industry" exemplified in Ten Days That Shook the World and The Battleship Potemkin.Pursuing this interest after her return to England, Ross became the film critic of The Daily Worker in a tumultuous era which fellow critic Dwight Macdonald described as spanning the Golden Age and Iron Age of Soviet cinema:
In her film criticism, Ross insisted that "the workers in the Soviet Union introduced to the world" new variations of this art form with "the electrifying strength and vitality and freedom of a victorious working class." Her reviews of early Soviet cinema were later described by scholars as "ingenious piece of dialectical sophistry."
Eve of the Spanish Civil War
In mid-September 1936, while the Spanish Civil War was in its first year, Ross purportedly met English poet and communist John Cornford at the Horseshoes pub in England while in the company of his friend John Sommerfield. As "the first Englishman to enlist against Franco," Cornford had just returned from the Aragon front where he had served with the P.O.U.M. militia near Saragossa and fought in the early battles near Perdiguera and Huesca. Cornford had then returned to England from Barcelona in order to recruit volunteers to combat the fascists in Spain.Following the initial meeting between Ross and Cornford, a near brawl occurred at the pub when an ex-fascist volunteer who had been in the Irish Brigade was present and almost came to blows with Cornford over the subject of the war. After leaving the pub, Cornford and Ross went for dinner to Bertorelli's on Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia, central London, where Ross impressed Cornford with her knowledge of ongoing political matters in Spain, as well as between England and Germany. By the end of the evening, Cornford and Ross may have become a couple.
Cornford possibly moved into Ross' apartment in the ensuing weeks while he recruited volunteers to return en masse with him to Spain. While living with Ross, Cornford published his first book of poems and worked on a Lysistrata translation. However, if such a relationship occurred, this brief union was not to last due to their mutual commitment to fighting Franco in Spain.
War Correspondent
Arrival in Republican Spain
In September 1936, Ross travelled to war-torn Spain either in the company of Claud Cockburn or separately. At this point, Cornford had returned to Spain with twenty-one British volunteers to fight the fascists and had become "the acknowledged leader among the British contingent in the International Brigades." He served with a mitrailleuse unit and fought in the Battle of Madrid in November and December 1936. During the subsequent battle for University City, he was wounded by a stray anti-aircraft shell. Despite his injuries, he then served with the English-speaking volunteers of the Marseillaise Brigade and was killed in action at Lopera, near Córdoba on 27 or 28 December.Upon hearing of Cornford's death, Ross may have been emotionally devastated and may have attempted to kill herself with an overdose of sleeping pills. Decades later, she would confide to her acquaintance John Sommerfield during a personal conversation that Cornford "was the only man ever loved." The death of Cornford and other friends in the service of the doomed Republican cause likely solidified Ross' anti-fascist sentiments, and she remained in Republican Spain throughout the prolonged conflict as a war correspondent for The Daily Express.
Journalist and Propagandist
Throughout the Spanish Civil War, Ross worked for the London branch office of the Espagne News-Agency, also known as the Spanish News Agency. During Ross' tenure in the organization, the Espagne News-Agency was accused by journalist George Orwell of being a Stalinist apparatus which disseminated false propaganda in order to undermine anti-Stalinist factions on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. In particular, during the Barcelona May Days, when anarchist factions on the Republican side were annihilated by Stalinist-backed troops, the Espagne News-Agency and The Daily Worker published false claims in that the anarchists had been planning a coup and were secretly allied with the fascists and thus justified their extermination.All of the agency's staff—including Ross—were "trusted junior functionaries of the Comintern apparatus," the international Communist organization determined to create a worldwide Soviet republic. Ross' fellow Comintern propagandists included Hungarian-British journalist Arthur Koestler, Willy Forrest, Mildred Bennett of the Moscow Daily News, and Claud Cockburn.
Ross and Cockburn became closer as the civil war progressed in Spain. By this time, Cockburn was "a leading British Communist Party member" and, within a span of five years, he would rise to be a leader of the Comintern in Western Europe. While covering the Spanish Civil War for The Daily Worker in 1936, Cockburn had joined the elite Fifth Regiment of the left-wing Republicanos battling the right-wing Nacionales and, when not fighting, he gave sympathetic coverage to Communist Party.
While Cockburn fought with the Fifth Regiment, Ross served as a war correspondent for The Daily Express. When Cockburn was at the frontlines, Ross ghost-wrote his columns for him, "imitating his style and filing it at The Daily Worker under his name, while at the same time continuing to send her own reports to the Express." During this time, Ross was embedded with Republican defenders in the Spanish capital city of Madrid.
Among the other foreign correspondents alongside Ross in besieged Madrid were journalist Herbert Matthews of The New York Times, Ernest Hemingway of the North American Newspaper Alliance, Henry Tilton Gorrell of the United Press International, and Martha Gellhorn of Collier's magazine, as well as Josephine Herbst. Ross and other foreign correspondents often dined together for lunch and dinner in the ruined basement of the Gran Via, "the only restaurant open in the whole of Madrid" during the relentless bombardment by fascist troops. The basement restaurant was heavily guarded by armed Loyalist sentries, and no one was permitted entry without a press pass.
Reporting on the Southern Front
In Spring 1937, as the civil war progressed, Ross, her friend Richard Mowrer of The Chicago Daily News and their guide Constancia de la Mora travelled to Andalusia to report on the southern front. To this end, Ross investigated and reported upon war-time conditions in Alicante, Málaga, and Jaén. The latter town had been bombed a week before her arrival by a squadron of German Junkers 52. Amid the rubble, Ross reported on the bombing's death toll and interviewed the mothers whose children had perished in the bombardment as well as other survivors. She then proceeded to Andújar where—amid the ongoing battle and machine-gun fire—she interviewed Colonel José Morales, a commander of the southern armies.Following her interview with Morales, the convoy in which Ross was travelling faced recurrent enemy fire and later, during the evening outside a monastery, were bombed by a fascist air patrol. De la Mora vividly recalled this bombing as one of the daily perils which Ross and other pro-Republican journalists endured to report news from the front lines:
During her time in Andújar, Ross would endure nine aerial bombardments by German Junkers and survived each despite the lack of air raid shelters. Recalling these events, Mora described Ross as a fearless reporter who had seemingly resigned herself to death and looked "as natural as possible" when the bombs fell. Her friends noted that "she had a comforting air of calmness about her." Following her reporting in Andújar, Ross continued to report from the battle-lines of the Córdoba and Extremadura fronts. She would report on the progress of the war, often from the front lines of the Republican forces, for the next year.
Fall of Madrid and Return to England
In Winter 1938, while pregnant with Cockburn's child, Ross witnessed the final months of the Siege of Madrid and endured aerial bombardment by Francoist attackers. By the time the besieged city fell to the Nationalist armies on 28 March 1939, a pregnant Ross had already returned to England. Her wartime experiences—especially the atrocities she witnessed and the friends she lost in combat—solidified her lifelong commitment to anti-fascist resistance.Sixty days after Madrid fell to the Nationalist forces, Ross gave birth to a daughter by Claud Cockburn. The child Sarah Caudwell—born 27 May 1939—was the only offspring of their union. Although some sources allege that Ross did not marry Cockburn due to her political beliefs regarding women's emancipation, in actuality Cockburn was still married under British law to his first wife Hope Hale Davis and hence he could not marry Ross at that time without committing bigamy. Whether or not Ross knew that Cockburn was still legally married to Davis is unknown. However, several months before the birth of their child, Ross had filed a deed poll in which she changed her surname to Cockburn.
The same year that Ross became pregnant with Cockburn's child and that their daughter was born, Cockburn entered into a clandestine relationship with Patricia Arbuthnot. In August 1939, three months after the birth of their daughter, Cockburn "walked out" on Ross and their newly-born child to cohabitate with Arbuthnot. Cockburn would later omit all mention of Ross from his memoirs. Following her abandonment by Cockburn, Ross did not have another recorded partner. She later opined to an acquaintance that "having a man around was like having a crocodile in the bath."
Later life and death
World War II and Post-War Years
Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Ross, her daughter Sarah, and her widowed mother Clara Caudwell moved to Hertfordshire. Ross became friends with Isherwood's old acquaintance Edward Upward and his wife Hilda Percival whom were both socialists in outlook. Upward later met Olive Mangeot through their attendance of Communist Party meetings, and the two began an extramarital affair. Olive—whom Isherwood depicted as Marvey Scriven in The Memorial and as Madame Cheuret in Lions and Shadows—eventually separated from her husband Andre Mangeot and lived in Gunter Grove where she invited Jean Ross and her daughter Sarah to live with her.For many years, Ross and her daughter Sarah lived as Olive's boarders in modest circumstances in Gunter Grove. Much like Ross, Mangeot once had been an apolitical bohemian in her youth and transformed with age into a devout Stalinist who sold The Daily Worker and was an active member of various left-wing circles. According to Isherwood, Mangeot, Ross, and their social circle staunchly refused to consort with Trotskyites or other communist schismatics who had strayed from the Stalinist party line.
Parenthood and Socialist Activities
For the remainder of her adult life, Ross devoted herself to two causes: Advancing the ideology of socialism and raising her only daughter Sarah. In order to obtain the "best education" available for Sarah, Ross relocated with her child to Scotland. In 1960, they returned to Barnes, London, for Sarah to attend Oxford University. They lived with Jean's sister, Margaret "Peggy" Ross, a sculptor and painter trained at the Liverpool School of Art. At this point, Ross acted as a caretaker for both her invalid sister Peggy, who had severe arthritis affecting her mobility, and her ailing mother Clara who had a debilitating stroke. Under Ross' tutelage, her daughter Sarah became one of the first women to join the Oxford Union as a student and to speak in the Oxford Union's Debating Chamber. She later taught law at Oxford, became a senior executive at Lloyds Bank and later became a celebrated author of detective novels.While Sarah was at Oxford, Ross continued to engage in political activities ranging from protesting nuclear weapons to boycotting apartheid South Africa to opposing the Vietnam War. Even at an advanced age, she continued to make daily rounds to neighbouring houses to sell copies of The Daily Worker and participated in raising awareness regarding ongoing political campaigns. Acquaintances who met Ross during the later decades of her life noted that various hardships and impoverished economic circumstances had taken its toll on her. "She seemed burned out," Sommerfield recalled, "with bruise marks under her eyes and lines of discontent round her mouth; her once beautiful black hair looked dead, and she wore too much make-up, carelessly applied. Only her voice was the same, a rapid, confiding drawl full of italics. She was still using the slang and political cliches of her youth, and trying to shock with a freedom of speech that now was taken for granted." By this time, she had few clothes and very little money.
Ross and writer Isherwood met a final time shortly before her death. In a diary entry for 24 April 1970, Isherwood recounted their final reunion in London in a diary entry:
Three years later, on 27 April 1973, Ross died at her home in Richmond on Thames, Surrey, aged 61, from cervical cancer. She was cremated at East Sheen.
Dislike of ''Sally Bowles'' and ''Cabaret''
According to Ross' daughter Sarah Caudwell, her mother detested her popular identification with the vacuous character of Sally Bowles. She believed the political indifference of the character more closely resembled Isherwood himself or his hedonistic friends, many of whom "fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the Stormtroopers looked in their uniforms." Ross' opinion of Isherwood's own beliefs is partly confirmed by Isherwood biographer Peter Parker who wrote that Isherwood was "the least political" of W. H. Auden's social circle in Weimar Berlin, and Auden himself noted the young Isherwood "held no opinions whatever about anything."According to her daughter, Ross further disliked the character of Sally Bowles as the character offended her feminist convictions: Isherwood's fictionalized depiction of Ross employed a literary convention which necessitated "that a woman must be either virtuous or a tart. So Sally, who is plainly not virtuous, must be a tart to depend for a living on providing sexual pleasure." Such a submissive gender role would have "seemed to the ultimate denial of freedom and emancipation."
Above all, however, Ross resented that Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles had depicted Ross as expressing anti-Semitic bigotry. In the 1937 story, Bowles laments bedding an "awful old Jew" in order to obtain money. Ross' daughter insisted that such racial bigotry "would have been as alien to my mother's vocabulary as a sentence in Swahili; she had no more deeply rooted passion than a loathing of racialism and so, from the outset, of fascism." Accordingly, due to her unyielding dislike of fascism, Ross was incensed that Isherwood had depicted her as thoughtlessly allied in her beliefs "with the attitudes which led to Dachau and Auschwitz." In recent decades, some writers have argued the anti-Semitic remarks in the 1937 novella Sally Bowles are actually a reflection of Isherwood's own much-documented prejudices. In Peter Parker's biography, "Isherwood is revealed as being fairly anti-Semitic to a degree that required some s of the Berlin novels when they were republished after the war."
Isherwood never publicly confirmed that Ross was his model for Sally Bowles until after her death. However, other mutual acquaintances were less discreet. Ross herself indicated that her former partner, journalist Claud Cockburn, had leaked to his friends in the press that she had inspired the character. In 1951, poet Stephen Spender publicly confirmed that Bowles was based on a real person in his autobiography World Within World, and he further confirmed the abortion incident was factual. Later, Gerald Hamilton—the inspiration for "Mr. Norris"—identified Ross as Sally Bowles in his 1969 memoir The Way It Was With Me due to a public feud with Bowles' former partner Claud Cockburn. Consequently, when Cabaret garnered acclaim in the late 1960s, Ross was tracked down by journalists and hounded with intrusive questions, particularly by the Daily Mail.
Badgered by the press, Ross refused to discuss her sexual misadventures in Weimar Berlin. Her daughter claimed the journalist's relentless interrogations "were invariably a disappointment on both sides: the journalists always wanted to talk about sex" while Ross "always wanted to talk about politics." Ross bitterly noted that reporters always claimed to seek knowledge "about Berlin in the Thirties" and yet they did not wish "to know about the unemployment or the poverty or the Nazis marching through the streets—all they want to know is how many men I went to bed with." Ross became particularly incensed when the reporters ascribed her many sexual affairs to her feminist beliefs:
Ross steadfastly declined invitations to watch Cabaret or any related adaptations. Her ambivalence towards the popular success of Cabaret was not unique among Isherwood's acquaintances: The poet Stephen Spender lamented how Cabaret glossed over Weimar Berlin's crushing poverty, and he later noted that there was "not a single meal or club in the movie Cabaret that Christopher and I could have afforded." Both Spender and Ross often contended that Isherwood's stories glamourised and distorted the harsh realities of 1930s Berlin. In Ross' own words, Isherwood's "story was quite, quite different from what really happened." However, she admitted that the depiction of their social group of British expatriates as pleasure-seeking libertines was accurate: "We were all utterly against the bourgeois standards of our parents' generation. That's what took us to Berlin. The climate was freer there."
Portrayals and Legacy
Isherwood canon
Sally Bowles—the fictional character inspired by Ross—has been portrayed by a number of actress over the decades: Julie Harris in I Am a Camera, the 1951 adaptation of Goodbye to Berlin and the 1955 film adaptation of the same name; Jill Haworth in the original 1966 Broadway production of Cabaret; Judi Dench in the original 1968 West End stage version of Cabaret; Liza Minnelli in Bob Fosse's 1972 film adaptation of the musical, and Natasha Richardson in the 1998 Broadway Revival of Cabaret.In 1979, critic Howard Moss noted the peculiar resiliency of the Sally Bowles character in a The New York Times article: "It is almost fifty years since Sally Bowles shared the recipe for a Prairie oyster with Herr Issyvoo in a vain attempt to cure a hangover" and yet the character in "subsequent transformations" lives on "from story to play to movie to musical to movie-musical." Moss ascribed the character's continuing appeal to "the tone of sophisticated innocence" which pervades Isherwood's depiction of both the character and Weimar Berlin in which "the unseemly and the ugly" are either deemphasized or made to appear genial to the spectator.
According to critic Ingrid Norton, the character of Sally Bowles later inspired Truman Capote's Holly Golightly in his novella Breakfast at Tiffany's. Norton has posited that Isherwood's Bowles was the key model for Capote's Golightly character. Norton has alleged that both scenes and dialogue in Capote's 1958 novella have direct equivalencies in Isherwood's earlier 1937 work. Capote had befriended Isherwood in New York in the late 1940s, and Capote was an admirer of Isherwood's novels.